Meredith Hemmings

Name: Meredith Hemmings (aka Pandora Black)

Gender: Female

Age: 18

Grade: 12

School: Bayview Secondary School

Hobbies and Interests: Music (Goth and Punk), Fashion (Hot Topic), Culture (Goth), Poetry (Dark, depressing), Graveyards and Aerial Acrobatics

Appearance: Standing at 5ft 5inches with a perfect hourglass figure, Meredith is a pale-looking young lady sporting heavy mascara, dark eyeliner and black lipstick. She's not much of a looker, with muddy-brown eyes and pouty lips settled underneath a slightly too large and pointy nose. Her purposefully flattened hair is 90% raven black and 10% blonde roots showing. The skin below her face is tanned. Her arms and shoulders are skinny but toned.

She tends towards dressing in black, red, lace, corsets and vampy high-heeled boots AND pleather... Lots and lots of pleather. If it can be bought at Hot Topic, chances are that Meredith is wearing it.

Biography: Meredith Hemmings was born in St Paul, the middle daughter of a middle class family. Her family members consist of parents, Mr Colin Hemmings (Dentist) and Mrs Jacintha Hemmings (Bored Housewife); older sister Rebecca Hemmings (College Dropout) and younger brother Adrian Hemmings (Grade 7).

As a child, Meredith really looked up to her older sister Rebecca. In her eyes, Rebecca could do no wrong. Rebecca could effortlessly get good grades, she was popular with the boys and she was an accomplished ballerina. In contrast, Meredith worked hard just to get a B-. Still, things were okay when there were just two sisters around. While Rebecca may have outshined her younger sister by far, Meredith did get enough attention from her parents on the occasions when she did do well.

Everything changed when Adrian was born. The family's first son. Adrian was just as smart as Rebecca and just as talented. With Adrian getting all the attention for being the first son and Rebecca getting attention for being an overall success, Meredith began to feel as if she was being forgotten.

Young Meredith threw tantrums, screaming for attention whenever her parents fawned over her younger brother. Eventually, in a bid to find something, ANYTHING, that she could be good at that nobody else could, Meredith demanded to be enrolled into circus school on the trapeze after watching a big top special on TV. Her parents caved and let her join the school. She took her trapeze lessons fairly seriously and worked hard at school, wanting to become more like her older sister, Rebecca.

Things began to look up for Meredith when Rebecca left for college. Meredith was getting the attention she craved. Still looking up to her older sister, she worked even harder at school and at trapeze classes, maintaining that B- average and giving her parents something to brag about.

Everything was peachy, until Rebecca dropped out of college and moved back home, taking a minimum wage job as a waitress instead, breaking her parent's suburban dream. It seemed, to Meredith at least, that everything she had worked for became pointless. If Rebecca couldn't make it, then what chance, really, could Meredith possibly have?

The combination of disappointment in her sister, whom she kept on a pedestal all her life and the stress of living in an overcrowded house made things difficult for Meredith. Things were made all the more worse when the screaming matches between her parents and sister over college started. Meredith started to babble incessantly, speaking everything on her mind out loud, no doubt hoping that her constant chatter would drown out her family's pointless arguments. She lost the motivation to work. Her grades started to drop, from that B- average to a D average. She stopped trapeze altogether, there just didn't seem to be a point to it.

Meredith started to listen to loud, noisy, dark and creepy music. Over time and through the judicial application of make-up, her face got paler and paler, her eyeshadow darker and darker and her hair changed from blonde to blue to black. She started "smoking" without actually inhaling the smoke, just holding a lit cigarette in her fingers and occasionally in her lips. She occasionally hung out at graveyards during the day (it's too spooky at night). She attempted writing depressing poetry, but wasn't any good at it. She's "changed" her name to Pandora Black, insisting that everyone call her that, though she hasn't had it changed legally.

With these changes, Meridith seems to be getting the attention she wants. She certainly turns heads when she's at school. While she does hang out with other goths, it's slowly becoming clear to her peers that she's nothing but a poser, wearing the trappings of goth without actually being one. Still, she's just odd enough to fit in and she'll do almost anything to keep fitting in.

She'll probably move on to her next attention-grabbing trend if she's ever outed as an impostor. Her parents disapprove of everything that she does, of course, but to Meredith, disapproval seems to give her as much attention as she craves as approval does.

Advantages: Upper arm strength, strong grip and good reflexes. Meredith can jump fairly high if she needs to. As an ex-trapeze student, she'll be able to tell if something can take her weight by testing it gently with her arms. Her flexibility will assist her in hiding in tight spots.

Disadvantages: Meredith's developed a habit of chattering constantly, even when she's alone. She lacks the motivation to push herself to excel and doesn't think for herself.

Designated Number: Female student no. 107

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Designated Weapon: Three-section-staff

Conclusion: Angst me a river, Pandora Black. Maybe you'll actually be able to use your drive for approval to do something truly atrocious. There's always a market for psychos who spill blood, guts, and worse, and nothing really matters anyways, right? Plus, you may actually be able to do something with that staff. I doubt you'll win, but, then again, what does it matter? This world isn't worth living in anyways, right? Just don't kill yourself. That would be such a letdown.

'The above biography is as written by selphie_trabia. No edits or alterations to the author's original work have been made.'

Evaluations
Kills: None

Killed By: Ema Ryan

Collected Weapons: Three Section Staff (Assigned)

Allies: None

Enemies: Roland Harte, Dave Morrison, Jonathan Jarocki, Sofia Martelli

Mid-game Evaluation: Meredith Hemmings started the game in the mirror house. Traumatised by the memory of her teacher's deaths, particularly that of Mrs Bishop, Meredith proceeded to vent her frustrations out on her own reflection. Her angry screams woke Roland Harte and drew the attention of Dave Morrison, who attempted to calm her down before getting frustrated and ranting at her. At this point, Meredith became hysterical, first laughing then crying as she tried to keep her emotions under control. She then spotted Roland Harte and attacked him under the mistaken impression that he had just killed someone, her delusional mind citing the knife in his hand and the blood on his forehead as evidence. Roland Harte threw Meredith into a mirror, that she luckily bounced off of without much injury. She played dead until Roland and Dave left the mirror house with Isabel Guerra. Once the group had left, Meredith wrote in her notebook, then lost her temper and tore up her survival booklet alongside the first page of her notebook, scattering the pieces around her before falling asleep from exhaustion.

Meredith woke up a few hours later and prepared to leave what she had started to think of as her "base of operations" by smashing mirrors at both exits to the mirror house as a sort of intruder retardant. The smashing of the mirrors startled Scott McGregor, Jonathan Jarocki and Steve Barnes, who had entered the mirror house while she slept. She approached the trio and offered them the chance to write letters home in her notebook. After a brief argument with Jonathan, Meredith then exited the mirror house after the trio left.

Post-Game Evaluation:

Memorable Quotes: ''"Gimmie the fucking sword and I'll chop off his fucking arm for him if that's what you fucking want. If not, get out of my fucking way because I am going to fucking KILL Sofia and then maybe I'll do you all a fucking favour and kill myself as well. You hear me?" - ''Meredith to Evelyn just after her clothes get tossed into the river

Other/Trivia

 * Meredith was purposefully named so that handler Selphie_Trabia could refer to her as "Merry", which she definitely is not.

Threads
Below is a list of threads that contain Meredith, in chronological order.

The Past:

No threads

Pre-Game:
 * Going Balls Deep
 * People Watching

V4:
 * Mirror Mirror
 * Death at a Funeral
 * Cleanliness and Loneliness
 * The Gods Hate Us
 * Aching Chest and Blurry Sight
 * A way a lone a last
 * In For a Penny, In For a Pound
 * The Golden Treehouse
 * Et dans ces instants, j’aimerais être comme toi par moment

Your Thoughts
''Whether you were a fellow handler in SOTF or just an avid reader of the site, we'd like to know what you thought about Meredith Hemmings. What did you like, or dislike, about the character? Let us know here!''
 * Meredith had an interesting concept, and I think actually had a lot more depth than people gave her credit for. It was cool to see her have some interactions with a friend who did not share her gothic nature, and it showed that, whatever she may have said or wanted, Meredith actually did have the capacity for being friends with normal people.

On the island, she saw the chance to embrace her persona fully, though it definitely seemed like a coping mechanism. I actually quite liked the idea of going around and recording thoughts of students, and it's something that would have been cool to see get a more full exploration. Unfortunately, narratively it didn't quite work out for Meredith because her manner was off-putting to almost everyone she came across. While this was consistent with her character, it made it hard for her to get much development. This was especially the case because with a change in handlers came a sort of change in focus, but not really one that gave a much clearer idea of Meredith. She drifted, always on the outskirts of things, and while that's fine and pretty in-keeping with her character, I wish she'd gotten to do a little bit more or maybe to come to more of a personal conclusion in the end. I always felt like she could be really cool because pregame showed she wasn't just a goth stereotype, but she never really got a chance to show that on the island. - MurderWeasel